I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper. Oh you, veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you once popular policeman, now in solitary confinement after gracing that school crossing for years, you wretched emeritus read to by a boy! It would never do, would it, to have you fellows fall madly in love with my Lolita! Had I been a painter, had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments:

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies—a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

foehn (fohn, föhn) /fən/. noun. A warm, dry wind blowing down a mountain valley, specifically the north side and usually referring to the Alps. See also: katabatic, a wind on the lee, or sheltered side of a mountain. Borrowed from German. From Latin Favōnius (the west wind; a wind god).

Part of the Washington Phillips mystery was whether or not he played a dolceola, a “fretless zither” that looks like Schroeder’s miniature piano in Peanut. Turns out, he didn’t, but it’s a fascinating instrument. Fun to watch Andy Cohen demonstrate one of those little guys…even more to download (free!) Leadbelly’s Huddie Ledbetter’s Best featuring dolceola accompaniment by Paul Mason.

“I made a troll honeypot on Twitter. It posts opinions on a couple dozen topics, then, when people respond to it, responds at random from a list of 18 possible replies.” » Botsplaining.

Today in 1897, writer, terrible postmaster and Nobel Prize laureate William Cuthbert Faulkner is born in Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner’s great-grandfather, W.C. Falkner, had not only published a best-selling novel but was also a decorated Civil War colonel, eventually ousted for recklessness. In third grade, Faulkner was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and he replied, “I want to be a writer like my great-granddaddy.” We have that desire and the constant penury of his hard-drinking writer’s life—-and the fact that at just 5′-5″ tall he was refused enlistment during World War I—to thank for some of the finest novels and short stories in the English language. In addition to his literary fiction, Faulker famously moved to Hollywood to write, as he put it, the two types of movie he was familiar with, “newsreels and Mickey Mouse cartoons,” a part of his life fictionalized in the Coen brothers film Barton Fink. Faulkner would write or re-write many screenplays including To Have and Have Not, the only film to have two Nobel Prize winners (Faulkner and Hemingway) associated with it and The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks…rather successful despite both Hawks’ and Faulkner’s claims afterward that they still didn’t know who the murderer was.

…I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.